Both the client’s act in awarding a contract for the Work to the successful bidder/proponent, and the milestone date on which that occurred.
Many activities/deliverables are dated with reference to contract award. For example, MACA means “months after contract award.” It’s pronounced as if it were a word, rather than being spelled out.
Many RFPs require narratives on the bidder’s understanding of risk and approach to risk management. Often, what bidders provide wouldn’t be out of place in a textbook: plain-vanilla risk management processes that lay out standard identification, assessment, and mitigation steps. Boring! Worse, they show no sign of being tailored for this scope of work: Indeed, they show no sign of ever having done this scope of work.
Now, granted, clients can do better than to ask about “approach.” But even if they do give you this fuzzy question, it’s not that hard to do a better response. Start by thinking about things from the client’s point of view.
Is this the first time the client has bought this product/infrastructure/service, or the twentieth?
In fact, while we’re at it, how sophisticated is this client from an overall procurement point of view? In general, “more sophisticated” is “more better,” implying more mature, predictable (even reasonable) practices and, likely, more ability to specify their requirement in a way that reduces their contracting risk and your confusion: All good.
Just one more point. You’d think that government contracting would be pretty mature, with established, not to say rigid, practices. In Canada, you’d be half right. It is true of the folks on the process side: the contracting experts. It’s not always true of the folks on the requirements side: the technical experts, who sometimes work on only one RFP in their entire career. That one and only (or even just that first one) could be the one you’re bidding on. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can mean that you need to think a little more carefully about their perspective, especially on risk.
Thinking about risk from the client’s point of view allows you to submit a better risk-management response, in whatever form it takes, and also to show risk awareness throughout your entire proposal. The company marketers don’t always like it – they often see it as negative – but nothing says “Been there, done that, and done good!” more clearly than a good risk answer.
AFP = Alternate/Alternative (both are used) Financing and Procurement
It’s a procurement model that uses the private sector to fund infrastructure (think highways, hospitals, schools, and light rail transit systems) in return for a (usually) lengthy operations contract and staged repayments of the capital invested.
A sibling to public-private partnerships (aka PPP and P3).
How much time does a proposal editor need? It’s a question that is of more than theoretical interest to me at the moment, as I work my way through a flurry of documents against a looming deadline. It’s a question that should matter to everyone charged with setting out a response schedule.
It’s a shame the answer is unknowable or, at least, difficult to calculate. That’s because the answer depends on four things.
Sections come in for “editing” in states ranging from completely unreconciled cut-and-paste nightmares to mature drafts that have been through at least one review cycle: already known to be in the right order, with basically complete and responsive answers.
Time-to-edit has some sort of law-of-squares relationship to length. Fifty pages takes way more time to edit if it’s in one document than if it’s in five. There’s only so much trouble you can get into in ten pages, whereas fifty offers seemingly endless scope for structural and consistency issues – with structural problems being the slowest to repair.
Exactly what are you asking the editor to do? To review for completeness, responsiveness, consistency (within the section, across sections, with external documents like organization charts and lists of plans), clarity, marketing effectiveness, readability, pretty-to-look-at layout, English usage, or typos? Or (ahem) all of the above (pretty please)? And are they just supposed to identify problems, or to take a stab at fixing them?
Who do you have working for you? How fast do they work? How experienced are they at proposals? How well do they know the company? The work? The client?
Here are my rules of thumb:
How much time does a proposal editor need? Hey. You do the math.
A company that staffs client vacancies from its database of qualified workers but that does not take contractual responsibility for deliverables beyond the “bodies” it provides; that is, that does not manage the work performed by these bodies.
To be distinguished from companies that contract to provide services, including the management of staff.